"Red Indians" in play

[steepholm]

brisingamen's post today about Buffalo Bill's Wild West show (amongst other things) reminded me of a question I've occasionally prodded at but found no real answer to. When and how did the idea of "Red Indians" first take hold in the imagination of British children, as a possible basis for role play? Was Buffallo Bill himself a carrier? Or maybe Longfellow, or James Fenimore Cooper? I don't mean just the bare knowledge that such people existed so much as the tropes (or cliches) that were clearly already well in place by say, 1904, when Barrie wrote Peter Pan.

The earliest account I've found is from Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age (1895), where he's describing the games of his own childhood (Grahame was born in 1859):

They [i.e. the adults, aka 'Olympians'] were unaware of Indians,
nor recked they anything of bisons or of pirates (with pistols!),
though the whole place swarmed with such portents.  They cared
not about exploring for robbers' caves, nor digging for hidden 
treasure.  Perhaps, indeed, it was one of their best qualities
that they spent the greater part of their time stuffily indoors.

To be sure, there was an exception in the curate, who would
receive unblenching the information that the meadow beyond the 
orchard was a prairie studded with herds of buffalo, which it was
our delight, moccasined and tomahawked, to ride down with those
whoops that announce the scenting of blood.  He neither laughed
nor sneered, as the Olympians would have done; but possessed of a 
serious idiosyncrasy, he would contribute such lots of
valuable suggestion as to the pursuit of this particular sort of
big game that, as it seemed to us, his mature age and eminent
position could scarce have been attained without a practical 
knowledge of the creature in its native lair.  Then, too, he was
always ready to constitute himself a hostile army or a band of
marauding Indians on the shortest possible notice: in brief, a
distinctly able man, with talents, so far as we could judge, 
immensely above the majority.  I trust he is a bishop by this
time,--he had all the necessary qualifications, as we knew.

The combination of Indians and Pirates (or at least robbers) is particularly striking for Peter Pan watchers. But clearly by this time (the late 1860s?) most of the conventions of the game are well established. Are there any earlier instances of British children playing this game, in fact or fiction?

Comments

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

Great question! Coincidentally, what I'm looking at at the moment is what opportunities there would be for Native Americans/First Nations people to come into the country in the late 19th/early 20th century, and under what circumstances they would choose to settle. I'd assumed the tropes probably came over with Buffalo Bill's shows in the 1880s, but Grahame rather gives the lie to that.

However, I do know that George Catlin the painter came over to the UK in the early 1840s, with displays of paintings and artefacts, and then brought over Native Americans to wear the costumes, use the artefacts, etc. in 1844. These were Ojibway, apparently. I'm not entirely sure what they did in terms of performance, though I ordered a book earlier this morning which may provide some clues. However, I have found references which suggest that Catlin toured extensively in the UK during this period.

Also, I have come across tantalisingly brief references to Native Americans participating/being displayed at the Great Exhibition, but with no indication of what they did.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Well, the Jamestown colony did send back a group of Powhatans in the early 17th C., and other European nations also brought back natives. There was a huge boom in travel literature on the Americas, and there were illustrated translations of authors like Hakluyt from vert early on.

Plus, the English would have had brought back stories after the Seven Years' War, I imagine. Plus, as you say, Cooper.

But my guess (entirely supposition, but in the way of "maybe you can look here") is that the Englishmen who went over for the Land Rush and Gold Rush brought back stories about native peoples that added to an already existing narrative (marauding Indians, and English colonists murdered on their farms should have already been in the consciousness well before cowboys appear), and the narrative shifted to the more recent one of Cowboys and Indians, which was reinforced by travelling shows and dime novels.

One of the things that makes me think this is that Graham's description, and even Barrie's Indians, aren't part of the C/I game -- it's just Indians, and Indians with tomahawks and other accoutrements of the Native Americans of the Eastern part of North America. If you look at the narrative in places like Germany, for example (and the C/I thing is extremely popular there: there were still parks dedicated to it and the books of Karl May were very popular well into the 90s, and maybe still now), it's all much later, and the natives represented are the Plains peoples like the Apache, Sioux, and Comanche.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Not an answer to your question, but possibly of interest, is this article on British western films, the key period for which was apparently 1908-1913.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the information! I'd noticed the absence of cowboys, but wasn't sure how to interpret it - or even when the word came into common use. (The OED has one example from the 1840s, but otherwise it's all post-1880. The first reference to a game of "cowboys and Injuns", btw, is 1887 - in the New York Herald.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks - very interesting!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Figures they'd be there at the Great Exhibition! Oh for a Victorian Opie to tell us when all this filtered down into juvenile culture!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but the fact that street toughs were called Mohocks during the eighteenth century indicates that the idea of "savages" had taken hold of the British imagination pretty early on. (In fact, I should reread Orinooco to see if Behn was using third-hand reports on Native Americans for her imaginary isle.)

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

John Smith was writing pamphlets about his experiences in the 1600s, and Pocohontas made it to Gravesend

[dru-marland.livejournal.com]

Red Indians feature in Five Children and It, but, darn it, a few years after Golden Age. Lt Lismahago in Humphry Clinker certainly made an impression on me, if not on children in general, with his scalped skull and horrid adventures among the Miami Indians...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I guess he didn't make an impression on me, as I have no recollection of him, alas! In fact, all I remember of Humphrey Clinker is a scene in Bath, where a doctor appeals to the assembled company to confirm that everyone secretly enjoys the smell of their own farts. On the whole, I think I prefer Richardson.